Dear Colleagues,
I’m grateful to have one last opportunity as the executive sponsor for the Colorado Online Project to update you on our progress and to thank you for all you do every day to increase access to quality online learning and support services available to all students.
As I shared in the Information Session on Wednesday ( recording | PowerPoint), we’ve accomplished a lot already. Here are just a few examples:
- Students and instructors can now access online courses from a single instance of D2L, with expanded access to help desk support and online library resources.
- Using our own sectionizer technology, we can combine enrollments across colleges, increasing access for students, and enrollment at our colleges.
- Online success liaisons are now available to help students, instructors and staff work together across colleges to navigate existing processes.
We have also established new ways of working together across colleges:
- We have a Change Advisory Board with representatives from college faculty and staff so that we can collectively decide upon changes we want to make to our Learning Management System and related integrations.
- We have a Learning Design Community of Practice, bringing together learning designers and faculty at the colleges with central staff so that all faculty and instructors across the system have access to key professional development opportunities and learning resources.
- We have a team of College Implementation Leads (with backups) from every college that meets weekly with members of the support team to address questions and concerns, sharing strategies and best practices.
- We are strengthening the role of the Online Faculty and Instructor Advisory Committee and establishing workgroups of faculty and staff to better understand and address pain points around section size, section distribution, course materials, and roles and compensation related to course development. Workgroup members are being finalized and will be listed on the contact spreadsheet by March 15, meeting in April.
We are learning a lot and are making continuous improvements to the model, as demonstrated by changes and recommendations approved this month to help manage enrollment at scale during the transition:
- The IT team worked quickly to modify the sectionizer so that students can only enroll if there is capacity of our teaching sections, eliminating the need to enroll students over the cap in most if not all cases.
- In the rare case that a pooled teaching section would need to be overenrolled, the consortium will reimburse the college for paying the instructor $25/credit/student above the initial cap (34) at census to help compensate for the additional workload. Note: this does not replace ongoing discussions about modifying course caps and how to best arrive at an average class size of 25 at census).
- The consortium will also reimburse colleges for inconvenience fees paid to instructors if pooled sections are canceled by the consortium within two weeks of the course start.
- The consortium will allow colleges to request additional home college sections based on newer information or data.
This work is important, and the pace of change has been extremely fast. Having run our first seven pilot courses one year ago (Spring 2023), Colorado Online is now supporting over 46,000 student enrollments (Spring 2024), and we are on track to offer all our online courses through the consortium by Fall 2024! Please take a moment to celebrate this tremendous accomplishment and know that we see and appreciate the hard work and dedication this has required of everyone.
In my new capacity as President of Red Rocks Community College (starting March 18), I look forward to working alongside you to continue building the Colorado Online Consortium and will continue to serve as one of the college presidents on the Steering Committee. Executive Vice Chancellor, Diane Duffy, will serve as the Executive Sponsor for Colorado Online until a new Vice Chancellor of Academic and Student Affairs is in place. Diane is a strong supporter of collaborative leadership and has been involved in the Steering Committee and the Strategy/Decision team since the beginning of the project. Don’t hesitate to contact Diane or Tammy Vercauteren, Project Director, with questions or concerns about this project as we keep moving forward.
Sincerely,
Landon